SAS/ACCESS for Hadoop
Greetings and Salutations! I hope everyone who attended SAS Global Forum found the experience fun, educational, and inspirational! One of the sessions that was quite popular was the Hands-On-Workshop, "An Insider's Guide to SAS/ACCESS to Hadoop". This was taught by Jeff Bailey (Cloudera, formerly with SAS) and Diane Hatcher (SAS). Yes, that's me! 
By popular demand, I am providing the slides and exercises for the class. We didn't quite get through all of the exercises in 2 hours. There were a lot of great questions and discussion! Hadoop is a brave, new world -- so we are all learning together on how it works and how it works with SAS.
Some notes here:
- The attachment is a .zip file that is about 4.5Mg in size. Included in the .zip file are the following:
- PDF file that combines the slides plus the exercises. I consolidated these documents together after the workshop.
- Two (2) SAS datasets to help with some of the exercise ("customers" and "orders").
- One (1) text file for exercise 5.
- In order to actually work through the exercises, you will need the following:
- Base SAS (9.4) available somewhere -- either locally or on a server. You can use SAS Studio or Enterprise Guide for these exercises.
- SAS/ACCESS to Hadoop configured to point to an existing Hadoop environment. In the class, we used Cloudera 5.3 Quickstart VM, running in vmware's VM Player 7 as a single node local Hadoop cluster. Both Quickstart and VM Player are available as free downloads. We had the Quickstart VM configured for 4Gb RAM and 2CPUs. You can adjust these settings for your environment.
- The document also includes exercises for SAS Data Loader for Hadoop (courtesy of Lisa Dodson (SAS). You can get the free trial from http://www.sas.com/dataloader. SAS Data Loader Trial is also a VM that will run in VM Player 7. Instructions for installing and configuring SAS Dala Loader are available online, as well.
- If you have Data Loader Trial, you can configure this first for your Hadoop VM and reuse the configuration xml files and jar files that Data Loader gathers up to help configure SAS/ACCESS to Hadoop with your SAS environment. Feel free to message me, if you want to do this.
Please feel free to post your feedback and questions about the exercises in the comments for this post. I hope you get a chance to try out these exercises -- they will teach you alot about how to use SAS with Hadoop!
